


Her Entire World, Stuffed Into a Four Inch Screen

by storybycorey



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s11e04 The Lost Art Of Forehead Sweat, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-02-02
Packaged: 2019-03-12 18:09:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13552785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storybycorey/pseuds/storybycorey
Summary: post- TLAOFSAnd they look into each other’s eyes, across time and across space and across thousands of miniscule pixels.  And how the hell did Steve Jobs figure out how to stuff her entire world into just a four inch screen?





	Her Entire World, Stuffed Into a Four Inch Screen

“FaceTime, Mulder? How very millennial of you.” Her hair is tousled as she leans against her headboard, book laid aside and toes warm beneath the sheets.

“You know me, Scully, always hip to the dopest new trends on the street.” He’s pleasantly rumpled on the four inch screen before her. She thinks she can make out the old bedroom curtains behind him, beige and blue, billowing softly in the breeze.

It’s stuffy here—in the city—in the apartment she’s hated since the very moment she moved her items in. It never stood a chance though, not really, not with billowy breezes and pleasantly rumpled Mulder out there as competition. 

“So what’s the occasion? If I recall correctly, I said good night to you in person, oh, I don’t know, an hour and a half ago?” She finds herself trying to hide the pleased smile threatening to spill across her cheeks. It’s disconcerting knowing he can see her. 

“No reason really. I was just thinking… I don’t know, would I be too much of a wuss if I said I missed ya little bit?” And there it goes, spilling, that smile she’s not quick enough to catch. She feels like a schoolgirl with him lately, giddy and giggly, hoping he’ll ask her to the dance. She’s fifty-three, they slept with each other twice last week, and here she is blushing because he told her he missed her in math class today.

“You’d be a wuss even if you didn’t tell me you missed me,” she grins, then can’t help but laugh when he puts his hand to his heart, mortally-wounded-warrior-style. There’s a shift in the screen as he disappears for a minute, and then he’s back, flopping against the bed pillows, bedframe squeaking beneath him. “It’s nice though,” she continues more seriously, “Being missed. Makes a girl feel special.”

“Good,” he murmurs, “You deserve to feel special, Scully.” He scratches at his stubbled jaw. She knows it itches him in the evenings. Her fingers twitch. Other parts of her twitch, too—parts recently re-acquainted with that stubble.

“So, actually…,” he continues, leaving her twitching parts hanging. This feels so familiar. This feels like the old days, and that makes her feel even older, just thinking those words, but this feels like twenty years ago, lying in her bed on the phone, trying her very hardest not to want him. His voice drones on, “There _was_ something I wanted to mention now that I think about it. Something Reggie was saying, about—“ 

“This was one of those things, Mulder,” she interrupts.

“Huh? One of what things?” He’s in a gray tshirt, just like he’s always been. Even back then, always a gray tshirt, at least in her mind. But now she can actually see it.

“One of the things I want to remember, one of those things I’m afraid of spoiling now. Phone calls late at night, both of us in bed. I don’t know, doesn’t it scare you—that we’ll screw things up again?” It’s exhausting sometimes, analyzing every little thing. He’s here, in that warm gray shirt with that strong stubbled jaw, right in the palm of her hand. 

“Did we really screw things up though? Isn’t it all just part of the process?” he asks. “As difficult as things have been for us, they brought us here, didn’t they? Did the pull-out bed last week feel like a screw-up? Did that… _thing_ … I did with my… and then that _other thing_ … with my— please don’t tell me those were screw-ups, because damn, Scully, I’d need to rethink my whole existence if that’s how you feel…” He’s playing with her, nudging a proverbial finger beneath her chin to get her attention. She knows exactly the _thing_ and the _other thing_ of which he speaks, and they make her blush even now just thinking about them. 

She looks into her lap with an embarrassed smile. “Maybe you’re right,” she sighs. “This stuff with Reggie… It’s messing with my head.” This isn’t then, this is now. This is the two of them living their lives, figuring and re-figuring exactly where the pieces go. 

“And besides, this isn’t like old times anyway,” he continues. “We didn’t have FaceTime in the nineties, Scully.” He waggles his brows at her, and even on the small screen of her phone, the full extent of his intended debauchery shines through.

“Hmmm,” she smiles, “I sense that’s probably a good thing.” God, she wouldn’t have made it past year three with him if she’d had to look him in the eye each night on the phone. 

“Oh, I don’t know... I sure wouldn’t’ve complained— getting a glimpse of Special Agent Dana Scully, in her perfectly professional silk jammies, typing up her reports in bed each night…” She’d probably smack him if he were here with her. She’s probably smack him then take his lip between her teeth and show him just how perfectly professional she is.

“And how about you?” she asks, “What would I have seen looking into young Fox Mulder’s evenings back then?” The thought runs a sudden thrill through her veins. Strange as it is, they’ve never really talked much about this—about what things were like before. So many years of running and hiding. By the time things were calm, the past had been almost too far gone to revisit.

“Ohhh Scully, be careful what you ask for...” There’s a devilish grin on his face, and it’s tempting. It’s very tempting. 

She snuggles further against her pillows, looks him in his fuzzy digital eye and coyly raises her brow. “I’m asking, Mulder,” she says. His old leather couch, that lock of hair that never seemed to stay in place, regardless of how often she smoothed it back for him, those blue jeans that were worn in the most perfect of places… She wants to know.

“You’re asking, huh? Well uhh… let’s just say I stopped calling 900 numbers about two years into our partnership, because well… how do I say this… turns out I’d found other ways of handling things…” His smile is sheepish as he peeks through the phone, sheepish but also sexy as hell.

“Two years in, Mulder? Jesus, really? When I had that awful hair and those awful suits and that awful squeaky voice?” She wants to be offended, well, not offended, but shocked. She wants to be, but she’s too busy being turned on to try very hard.

“Oh believe me, there was nothing wrong with your voice. Your voice, Scully… Hell, back then I could get hard just _thinking_ about you saying my name. And late at night, when you were sleepy and irritated, and I could hear you shifting around in your bed? Mmmm, yeah, I mean, I basically had no choice.” She sucks in a shaky breath. Just the thought of him back then, touching himself while they spoke on the phone… 

All those years, the two of them on opposite sides of town, doing things to themselves they wished they could do to each other. So much time wasted. Is that what they’re doing now—wasting more time?

“I did it, too,” she murmurs after a minute. “Not two years in, but later.” She takes a quick glance at his face. “I’d call you sometimes, make up some reason… I’d tell myself I wasn’t going to, I’d try to hold out, but I was so lonely… and your voice was so warm… and I’d think about you on the other end of the phone, with your… with that chest and that stubble and those lips… it was like my hands had a mind of their own.” For a moment, she feels like she’s right back in her old oak bed, phone to her ear, insistent throb between her legs. Funny how things come full circle.

“Christ, Scully…,” he whispers, then continues, “If we’d only known. Maybe it would’ve been better if we’d had FaceTime then—it probably would’ve saved us a couple years heartache anyway.”

He’s there, and as much as she can tell from her pixelated screen, he’s still got a chest (it may be even broader than before), he’s still got that stubble (her fingers twitch again), and dear lord, yes, he’s still got those lips. 

“You know…,” she makes a show of looking at the clock, “It’s late at night now, isn’t it? And I’m sleepy, maybe a little irritated…,” she shifts quite obviously in her bed, “…shifting around in my bed...” The look on his face is priceless—it’s hunger and it’s need, and it’s Fox Freaking Mulder, man she’s loved for almost half of her screwed-up life. Fuck parallel universes. They’re in _this_ universe now, and the way he’s looking at her makes up for every year they wasted trying to get it right. 

“Scully.” His jaw clenches. “Show me,” he whispers. “Show me what you used to do.”

They look at each other across their screens, and though their images are bouncing up into space and then back again, you certainly wouldn’t know it. The heat there is just as intense as if they were face-to-face. Her tongue sweeps across her upper lip. “Okay,” she whispers. 

She lays her phone up on the nightstand, leans it against a pile of books until the angle’s right. She should’ve bought one of those little phone props at the store when she saw them last week. She would have, if she’d anticipated this. He’s still there, watching her.

“You gotta… you gotta talk to me, Mulder… Pretend…like back then…” She remembers those days, hoping but not hoping he’d call, or at least not admitting to hoping, phone on her nightstand, just like tonight.

“Yeah, okay… ummm yeah...” His voice is deeper now, more rumbling, than it was then. She likes it even better. “So uhh, so Scully, sorry to call so late, but I’ve got something to throw by you.” He still sounds so earnest though, this man who asks a thousand questions and searches for a thousand answers, all in the span of a day. “I’ve been reading up on this old German folklore, about the Morbach Monster …” She closes her eyes, allows his voice to fill the room. 

“…Legend has it the last place any known werewolf was killed was in Morbach, Rhineland-Palatinate...” Just like old times, late at night, frustrations of the day coming to a head, Mulder in her ear just as she’s reached her weakest point. 

“…To this day, the townspeople burn a candle in the village, as a reminder, as a warning…” His voice… Her hand drifts down her chest, cups an aching breast. Her neck arches back. 

“Christ, Scully… So uhhh… until one night, in 1988…” Both hands now, one on each side, kneading, imagining him across town on that old leather couch. She plucks her nipples into hard, sharp peaks through the silk of her top. He moans, low, and she wonders what she would’ve done, _then_ , if he’d done that over the phone. It makes her wet just to think about it.

“Ummm… uhh… okay… So one night this candle went out…” His voice is doing that thing it does, getting rough and gravelly and hoarse. She can feel it almost, in her mind, can feel it the way she can feel the stubble of his chin, scraping against her inner thighs. Buttons slip recklessly through their holes.

“And a… ummm… a huge wolf figure…” Silk sliding down her arms and cool air hitting her chest. Her nipples pucker even further, and she arches her back, draws her hands back up to her breasts, skims her knuckles slowly across their sensitive tips. Back then she didn’t have two hands to work with. Back then she could only imagine the way he’d feel, the way he’d sound, the beautiful grimace on his face the moment before he comes.

“Scully,” he groans softly. Then louder, “Scully,” until her eyes flutter open, until she’s pulled away from _back then_ and is instead in the here and now, alone in her apartment, Mulder across town in their big, warm bed. “Not _then_ ,” he says gently, “ _Now._ I don’t want to live in the past. Keep your eyes open. I’m right here. Look at me.”

And she does. She looks at him, and his eyes are the same ones they were last week, green and lonely and so much like home, when she climbed into a pull-out bed and found him after too many years of thinking he was lost. 

The screen turns on-end for a moment, but then he’s there again, not just his face, but his body, too. His chest, his stubble, his lips. Only now she can see them. After all those years, she can see them. Her breaths are still quick and her clit still throbs. She still loves him just as desperately as she used to. Maybe more.

He drags the gray tshirt over his head and slips off his sweatpants while she removes the remains of her pajamas. They watch each other, look intently into one another’s eyes, until she can hardly catch her breath from the heat of it. After what seems like hours, he reaches down. He’s hard already, and her mouth waters. “Touch yourself, Scully,” he begs.

“Tell me,” she murmurs. “Tell me what to do. Be my hands.” He takes a swipe up his length and he groans.

“Spread your…” Another swipe. “Spread your legs. Let me see you.” She does as he asks and angles herself toward the phone, pillows propped behind her head. There’s no way he can see much on the small screen but he grunts nonetheless. She feels—God, she feels so wanton right now. Wanton and wanted—it’s a delirious mix.

“So beautiful,” he sighs. “You’re so fucking beautiful. Are you wet? Touch yourself and tell me, Scully.” Her hands are slow and sensuous as they drift down her body. She imagines they’re his as she dips deep inside. Oh, wet, so wet. Swollen and wet. She moans.

“So wet,” she breathes. She spreads out her fingers and slides them through her folds, plays in the wetness so he can see, bites her lip when he circles his finger around the head of his cock and sucks a breath through his teeth. “Are you hard for me, Mulder?” she asks breathlessly.

“Twenty-five years,” he grits out, “Been hard for you for twenty-five years.” He cups his balls with one hand and takes a long, lazy pull with the other, showing her just how hard, showing her just what she does to him, even this many years in. It’s a heady sensation, affecting someone like that after such a long time.

“Fuck yourself for me, Scully. Put two fingers in the way I do and fuck yourself.” She whimpers as her hips arch off the bed. The things he can do to her with only his words—he knows she likes it, knows how hot it makes her when he talks to her like this. Peering at him through half-closed lids, she slides in two fingers and she fucks herself, just like he said. In and out, in and out, reaching for that spot he knows how to hit every time, that spot that can make her crazy. But she can’t quite— “Mulder,” she whines in frustration.

“It’s okay, honey. You’re okay,” he chides, fist pumping slowly but surely. “Your clit. Try your clit. Your clit’s always such a good girl, right, Scully?” 

And oh, he’s right. She pulls out her fingers and she finds it, her slick and swollen little nub, hot and aching for attention. Flattening out her fingers, she grinds them in a circle so the knuckles hit right, then continues, round and round and round. “Yesss,” she hisses, her head falling back in relief. 

“Yeah, like that…gooood…,” he praises her. She watches his hands as he matches her rhythm, up and down while she goes round and round. She increases her pace, watches to see if he does the same. He does. Of course he does. They’ve done things together for twenty-five years, even when it didn’t seem that way, even when things felt as far apart as they could possibly be. 

His abs are tight, and she longs to run her fingers over them, her tongue. She longs to feel his big heated hands on her skin. “Now,” he exhales, “Now with your other hand… your breasts, Scully. Touch your breasts the way I know you want to…”

He knows her so well. He always has. Her hand is full of her flesh before he even finishes, squeezing and massaging, then pinching, rolling. She moans deep in the back of her throat as she tugs on a nipple, whimpers when it’s still not enough. For years this was her routine, for years she did this alone. 

But now she knows what she’s missing.

“Want you here,” she begs desperately, hips rocking, fingers grinding. “God Mulder, I want you here.” A four inch screen isn’t enough. A pull-out couch isn’t enough. This screwed-up life isn’t enough. But it’s theirs, goddammit, it’s theirs.

“I know,” he shushes, “Baby, I know. I wanna be there, too.” He’s stopped for a moment, hands still and muscles straining, breaths seeping roughly through his lips. He watches her through the screen. 

“Mulder, keep going. Keep… Pretend it’s me. Wet your fingers and pretend it’s me. It’s me, twenty-five years ago, that first night in Bellefleur; eighteen years ago, when you kissed me at midnight; fifteen years ago, when we finally caught our breaths in New Mexico, when we loved each other so hard we had tears streaming down our cheeks. It’s me, Mulder, last week on that pull-out couch. It’s me…” 

“Scully,” he says. “God. Scully.” 

He starts back stroking. And she starts back stroking. And they look into each other’s eyes, across time and across space and across thousands of miniscule pixels. And how the hell did Steve Jobs figure out how to stuff her entire world into just a four inch screen? They pump and they circle, they grip and they squeeze, until there are nothing but hot, wet sounds filling their rooms—gasping breaths, soft whimpered moans, surnames uttered desperately between pleas to the divine. 

She’s there, she’s almost there, and she remembers the Goop-O from earlier, how all those good memories fit themselves inside his big, silly mold. The past fitting into the present, or something sentimental like that, she’s not quite sure, because she can’t concentrate anymore, his eyes right there and his muscles bunching up, and her pelvis tilting just, just right…

“Mulder,” she cries as the sensations overwhelm her, but not before she sees that beautiful grimace cross his face, not before she hears him call out her name as well. The waves wash through her with an intensity she never feels while doing this alone. Over and over again. But then of course, she really isn’t alone, is she?

A minute passes, and she hears him still gasping, hears him but can’t quite see him. Her phone must’ve slipped in the commotion, so she sits up and reaches for it, holds it up to her sweat-damp face. There he is, lying in their comfy old bed, smiling. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Scully,” he chuckles in a worn-out voice, “Does FaceTime sex make us cool now?”

“Mulder,” she chuckles back, “I think being cool is the least of our worries.” She shifts to a more comfortable position, looks at him, looks at the man he was twenty-five years ago, looks at the man he is now. She loves them both equally.

“So umm…,” he says, “I know we technically said goodbye in person, oh, I don’t know, two hours ago…” 

“Mmhmm?” she hums suspiciously with an eyebrow raised. 

“But you know, Scully… I uhh… even after all that, I still kinda miss you,” he pouts. Back in junior high, that boy who missed her in math class—he’s finally asked her out to the dance. 

She looks him in his digitized face—a little sheepish, a little exhausted, more than a little hopeful. She bites her lip to hold back a grin. “You’re a wuss, Mulder,” she laughs, and then coyly, “Be here in half an hour?” 

Before she even finishes the question, he’s scrambling for his shirt and his pants. He may be a wuss, but he’s _her_ wuss.

His hand looms large as it advances toward the phone, and then there’s his face, looming large, too. “Make it twenty minutes,” he grins, and then a blur again as he drops the phone to the bed to drag on his clothes.

“Wait! Mulder!” she calls. How many times has she said those words in her lifetime? How many more times will she say them?

“Yeah?” He’s breathless, already making his way to the door. 

She smiles. He always comes back. “Two wusses,” she says, and at his confused expression, “Because I still kinda miss you, too.” He grins, and she sees his face in a cemetery twenty-five years ago, laughing in the pouring rain, before the screen goes black. _The way it was_ was amazing. But now she looks forward to _the way it will be,_ too. 

In twenty minutes they’ll be wusses together. She can hardly wait.


End file.
